Do you finish it?

I've tried. It’s just too massive in its current state. With this being my freshman attempt in game development I've made many mistakes that now prevent me from finishing it in my free time. Someday I will do a postmortem and I think that could be useful to myself and the community. Suffice to say, mistakes were made. Here is the mile-high view.

Problem #1 - The scope got out of control.Even though keeping the scope small was my #1 priority, my inexperience prevented me from reining in my ambitions. I ended up getting a publisher for a year and that exacerbated the problem. I’ve completed other large projects in my spare time and so I thought I would be unstoppable being able to dedicate a full 40 hour work week to the game. In the end I took on way more than I should have.

I think this screenshot of the current state of the Catapult for Hire tasks illustrates this pretty well. I just roll my eyes at some of the things that I thought were important at the time!

Problem #2 - JavascriptI chose to use Unityscript (Unity's version of Javascript) which started to buckle under the weight of the size of the game. The project currently stands at over 50,000 lines of code and compile times were getting prohibitive. If you’re going to be creating a large project in Unity I would recommend C#.

Problem #3 - DependenciesI ended up incorporating a few different libraries in order to help speed up development but did so too early in the process. Maintaining, updating and adapting to their changes along the way may have hindered more than helped the project. If you’re going to incorporate libraries, do so as late as you can in the development cycle unless you have the time to encapsulate them properly.

Problem #4 - Cart before the horse.This one is a long story but in getting a publisher for the game I think there were some steps that were taken prematurely that added some perhaps unnecessary overhead for the duration of the project.

Problem #5 - Show and tellShowing the game early in the development inevitably creates mental fatigue. I would hear “Oh, you’re still working on that game?” from both the fan community and fellow game developers. It’s also harder to get media coverage when they show your game early as they are reticent to show it again until it is complete or nearly so.

Problem #6 - Self-CareIn pushing as hard as I did to get the game done I severely neglected myself. I’ve come to learn that eating, exercise and social habits are all extremely important for maintaining an ability to work effectively.

Now what?

I pushed my finances and family relationships to their limit and after the failed Kickstarter I had to stop. I incurred some debt and purchased the rights to the game back from my publisher. In order to avoid complete financial ruin, I had to dig in my heels and stop game development completely for all of 2015.

I have been pondering walking away from Catapult for Hire as well. She has been a tumultuous, life-destroying love. Was it worth maintaining the relationship? Do I take the life lessons I’ve gained and move on? It’s been a hard question for me to answer.

I recently broke out the latest build and I have to admit that still love Catapult for Hire. I long for that world. It’s such a whimsical, wonderful game but, unfortunately, it’s not something that I can attempt to finish at this point.

Since averting financial ruin, I have tried working on several different prototypes in my spare time. I have been working on one of them for the past few months and I’m loving the direction it is going in. Currently, there are two prototypes that are competing for my attention and I’m not sure which one I will finish first.